When you're walking around town chatting on your cellphone, or sitting in a cafe surfing the Web over Wi-Fi, do you ever wonder how wireless signals travel through the airwaves around you? Most of us probably don't give it much thought -- and yet use of these airwaves is precisely what makes many of our modern communications systems possible.

Radio spectrum is a natural resource, something that here in the U.S. is owned by all of us as American citizens. But which entities are operating in our nation's public airwaves, and where? Are these resources actually being used efficiently and effectively, or is a sizable portion of useful spectrum simply lying fallow?

We cannot conclusively answer these critical questions today, because our government has not taken and published a full inventory of spectrum ownership and use in the United States. Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) have introduced a bill in Congress that seeks to do just that. The Radio Spectrum Inventory Act calls on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to take a full inventory of our nation's spectrum resources between the 300 MHz and 3.5 GHz bands.

The Kerry/Snowe effort to take full stock of our nation's airwaves is a positive development. Often lost in the debate over how best to put our spectrum to use is the fact that these airwaves belong to the American public, not to any corporation or other entity. But without a clear idea exactly whether and how these airwaves are being used, it is difficult to have an informed conversation about the best way to allocate and use spectrum efficiently for the needs of the American people.

In the past decade, Wi-Fi and other innovative uses of our public airwaves have revolutionized wireless communications and triggered great economic and technological growth. Last year's white spaces decision paved the way for better and faster broadband Internet connections. More efficient use of spectrum holds potential for even greater gains. Developing and publishing a detailed inventory of our nation's airwaves would be the first step towards achieving this critically important goal.

This is not only a technological and economic concern, but a matter of public safety and hence, national security.

Public safety systems across the US rely on wireless bandwidth. Services cannot grow and be integrated without sufficient available bandwidth; often times, decisions to implement particular public safety features rest on the availability of wireless bandwidth in this range. It's simple math - less available bandwidth means less public safety.

A vote FOR this bill is a vote FOR progress, economic revitalization, national security, and innovation.

My concern is that licensed, not for profit users of RF spectrum, as Amateur Radio operators are, will be left standing in a whirlwind of dust with this bill. Going by what uses/users where mentioned in the post, Vs. those who weren't, is easy for me to be cynical. Concluding it'd about who gets to profit from the use of a shared resource and how much.

http://www.ntia.doc.gov/osmhome/LRSP/LRSP0.htm appears to be a partial "map" http://www.fcc.gov/oet/info/database/spectrum/ is another you'll have to download a pdf file. I believe the plan is to go beyond simple spectrum maps. As in determining if there are actually an RF transmissions, and arbitrarily deciding if the transmissions are worthwhile. I seem to want to recall a space shuttle mission task was to listen to the RF spectrum to determine how much activity was where.